Bharat Rakshak

Sachin wrote:Is there a copy of the book "Sky is the Limit - Signals in Operation Pawan" available for sale? Was looking for a copy. I am okay if it is a .PDF file, printed book or even suited for Kindle devices.

Aarvee wrote:Sir, let me know if you have found an answer. TIA.

Cyrano wrote:Spy vs Spy: ISI knew Kulbushan Jadhav was ‘small fry’, waited before snaring him, says new book
In the book 'Spy Stories: Inside the Secret World of the RAW and the ISI', the authors quote an unnamed colonel in the external intelligence wing of ISI as saying, “The ISI waited patiently, hoping to grow Jadhav into something special and then when he was big enough, as a target, ISI would pull him in."

+ Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) knew Kulbushan Jadhav was “small fry” but waited to “manufacture a big, fat Indian catch”.
+ Indian intelligence agencies infiltrated Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani’s circles and waited for foreign militants to join him.
+ On the 26/11 attack, foreign agencies sent 18 detailed briefs, including likely targets in Mumbai, the number of attackers, their route, and method — but all this intelligence was “largely ignored”.

The history of Islamic thought is a well-told tale, by both Muslim and Western scholars. This brief book thus offers little new. But it is a more than serviceable introduction for English-speaking readers who want to learn about (or need a refresher on) a wide variety of subjects, including the historical antecedents of the modern-day Salafists, the significance of the medieval Islamic scholar Ibn Tay-miyyah, the origins of the Wahhabis, and the basis of the concept of velayat-e faqih (rule by the jurisprudent), which the Iranian revolutionary Ruhollah Khomeini used to justify the clergy’s seizure of political power in Iran. Morrissey obviously enjoys the history of ideas—in his words, Islamic thought is an “intrinsically fascinating” subject—including recondite debates about the nature of God or the relationship between reason and revelation. Many knowledgeable readers will quibble with an occasional emphasis or interpretation, but on the whole, Morrissey does a good job tracing this diverse canon in clear, genial prose.

Understanding Chinese politics has become more important than ever. Some argue that China's political system is 'institutionalized' or that 'win all/lose all' struggles are a thing of the past, but, Joseph Fewsmith argues, as in all Leninist systems, political power is difficult to pass on from one leader to the next. Indeed, each new leader must deploy whatever resources he has to gain control over critical positions and thus consolidate power. Fewsmith traces four decades of elite politics from Deng to Xi, showing how each leader has built power (or not). He shows how the structure of politics in China has set the stage for intense and sometimes violent intra-elite struggles, shaping a hierarchy in which one person tends to dominate, and, ironically, providing for periods of stability between intervals of contention.

The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political Subject
John Sanbonmatsu

A work of political theory with a focus on questions of strategy that examines the politics of the New Left in the 1960s, showing how its expressivism led to political division and also prepared the ground for postmodernism. It shows also how the political economy of academic life in an increasingly commodified society strengthened the basis of postmodernism. Develops a brilliant account of a Marxism that sets itself the task of building a collective political subject capable of challenging capitalism in its moment of global crisis.

Making Sense of War: Strategy for the 21st Century
Alan Stephens, Nicola Baker

Making Sense of War provides a comprehensive and clear analysis of the complex business of waging war. It gives readers a thorough understanding of the key concepts in strategic thought, concepts that have endured since the Athenian general Thucydides and the Chinese philosopher/warrior Sun Tzu first wrote about strategy some 2500 years ago. It also examines the influence on strategic choice and military strategy of political, legal and technological change. This book discusses strategy at every level of competition, employing a thematic approach and using historical examples from 500 BCE to the present. It discusses the constraints and opportunities facing military commanders in the 21st century, and demonstrates that the formulation of military strategy will continue to be perhaps the single most important responsibility for senior security officials. Making Sense of War offers original insights into the imperatives of military success in the era of asymmetric warfare.

The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War
Williamson Murray, Alvin Bernstein, MacGregor Knox

Moving beyond the limited focus of the individual strategic theorist or the great military leader, The Making of Strategy concentrates instead on the processes by which rulers and states have formed strategy. Seventeen case studies--from the fifth century B.C. to the present--analyze through a common framework how strategists have sought to implement a coherent course of action against their adversaries. This fascinating book considers the impact of such complexities as the geographic, political, economic and technical forces that have driven the transformation of strategy since the beginning of civilization and seem likely to alter the making of strategy in the future.

Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600-1830
Jonathan Eacott

Linking four continents over three centuries, Selling Empire demonstrates the centrality of India--both as an idea and a place--to the making of a global British imperial system. In the seventeenth century, Britain was economically, politically, and militarily weaker than India, but Britons increasingly made use of India's strengths to build their own empire in both America and Asia. Early English colonial promoters first envisioned America as a potential India, hoping that the nascent Atlantic colonies could produce Asian raw materials. When this vision failed to materialize, Britain's circulation of Indian manufactured goods--from umbrellas to cottons--to Africa, Europe, and America then established an empire of goods and the supposed good of empire.

Eacott recasts the British empire's chronology and geography by situating the development of consumer culture, the American Revolution, and British industrialization in the commercial intersections linking the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. From the seventeenth into the nineteenth century and beyond, the evolving networks, ideas, and fashions that bound India, Britain, and America shaped persisting global structures of economic and cultural interdependence.

The Great War at Sea: A Naval History of the First World War
Lawrence Sondhaus

This is a major new naval history of the First World War which reveals the decisive contribution of the war at sea to Allied victory. In a truly global account, Lawrence Sondhaus traces the course of the campaigns in the North Sea, Atlantic, Adriatic, Baltic, and the Mediterranean and examines the role of critical innovations in the design and performance of ships, wireless communication, and firepower. He charts how Allied supremacy led the Central Powers to attempt to revolutionize naval warfare by pursuing unrestricted submarine warfare, ultimately prompting the United States to enter the war. Victory against the submarine challenge, following their earlier success in sweeping the seas of German cruisers and other surface raiders, left the Allies free to use the world's sea lanes to transport supplies and troops to Europe from overseas territories and eventually from the United States, which proved a decisive factor in their ultimate victory.

America, War and Power: Defining the State, 1775-2005 (War, History, and Politics)
Lawrence Sondhaus, A. James Fuller

Written by leading historians and political scientists, this collection of essays offers a broad and comprehensive coverage of the role of war in American history. Addressing the role of the armed force, and attitudes towards it, in shaping and defining the United States, the first four chapters reflect the perspectives of historians on this central question, from the time of the American Revolution to the US wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Chapters five and six offer the views of political scientists on the topic, one in light of the global systems theory, the other from the perspective of domestic opinion and governance. The concluding essay is written by historians Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, whose co-authored book The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000 provided the common reading for the symposium which produced these essays. America, War and Power will be of much interest to students and scholars of US military history, US politics and military history and strategy in general.

While writing this book, I didn’t have a title in mind, so I titled the word document during its creation phase as ‘Story Book’. Looking back today, after finishing this book, I realize that it was in a way, a working title that perfectly sums up what this book is about – A collection of stories about a facet of military life that not many outside of this profession are aware of.

Normally, when we see a soldier – whether in real life or on social / mainstream media, what we see is a man or a woman donning a uniform and carrying on with their duty. Practically each and every soldier in this context seems indistinguishable from any other.

To be fair, this is how militaries operate – As a group of men and women bearing arms for the safety and integrity of their Nations. Rambos exist only in Hollywood movies. Real life militaries work as teams of men and women.

However, this visualization of soldiers in the form of unseen faces in similar uniforms leaves out one critical aspect – that of the man who actually dons the uniform, and puts his life on the line in the course of his chosen profession.

My aim behind writing this book was to bring out this man behind the uniform. He too is a human being, just like the rest of his countrymen. He too is a product of this very society from which we all hail. And yet, there is so little that is known about him.

In order to bring this out, I have relied mostly on my own experiences of being a military man for the past 25 odd years of my life. These 25 years have taught me first-hand that military isn’t a mere career; it is instead a way of life. This way of life has not only taught me so many different lessons, but has also blessed me with a huge family that comes with the job!

The reason for I deciding to write this book was to tell you, Dear Reader, a bit about this family and the way it lives. Not too many serving soldiers or veterans have written about this aspect of soldiering, leading to misconceptions and clichés filling up this void.

Valuable life lessons have been taught to me at the unlikeliest of places by the unlikeliest of people. These have included peers, senior officers, as well as the juniormost soldiers of the battalion. I have named a few of them in this book, while many more have not found a mention. Yet, each and every one of them is owed a debt of gratitude that cannot be repaid, ever.

The greatest endowment by my career thus far has been thick bonds of brotherhood that have lasted for nearly a quarter of century already, and will no doubt, carry on till the time I breathe my last. There are a few such brothers who have fallen in the course of duty, yet they too are cherished and remembered by all that knew them.

What pains at times is the fact that not much is written, or otherwise known about what goes into making the Indian soldier what he is. What is normally seen is merely the manifestation of a way of life that produces some excellent soldiers.

My hope is that this book will, to some extent, fill the void that exists as far as knowing the person behind the uniform goes, as well as the Way of Life that the Indian Army is.

Happy Reading!

LEARNING – A TWO WAY STREET

In the Indian Army, the responsibility to administer, train and lead a battalion rests on the shoulders of the officers, JCOs and NCOs. Direction always flows downward from the top man – the Commanding Officer, who is also the person on whose shoulder rests the final responsibility of whatever happens within the battalion.

Such is the responsibility reposed in each and every Commanding Officer of the Indian Army. But then, how does a young, 22 year old guy get to a stage where in a span of hardly 15-16 years of service, he becomes competent enough to take life or death decisions for a body of 800 or more men?

This is what I intend to partly bring out by the way of this story.

The younger days of any officer’s life in the Indian Army are not only amongst the most memorable ones, but they also play a crucial role in deciding what kind of an officer he becomes as he grows in service. For a battalion, it is a sacred responsibility since a good officer who can lead his men effectively on and off the battlefield, is worth his weight in gold.

Thus, mentorship of young officers who join a battalion is a responsibility that rests on the shoulders of practically each and every soldier of the battalion, from the youngest NCO, JCOs, his immediate senior officer (or subaltern), right upto the Commanding Officer of the battalion.

Such mentoring usually happens in the form of structured training in the drills and traditions of the battalion during the first one month of a young officer reporting to the battalion wherein he is made to stay with the troops in their barracks and learn their duties, their routine and such likes. In this duration, he gradually progresses from the duties / responsibilities of the junior-most rifleman to those of the NCOs and JCOs, followed by an exposure to the workings of the Battalion Headquarters under the mentorship of the Adjutant, the Quartermaster and their respective head clerks.

It is only after this month-long ‘line attachment’ that a young officer is ‘dined in’ as a member of the Officers’ Mess and shifts from the troops’ barracks to the single officers’ lodgings in the battalion.

However, this doesn’t mean that the mentorship phase is over. Typically it continues for the first few years of a young officer’s service and I mentioned earlier, practically each and every person in the battalion does his bit.

I too have been through the same mentorship process.

My first experience of it happened on the very second day in the battalion when I reported for the first parade of the day – the Physical Training, or the PT Parade. It was forty minutes of sweating even in the coldest part of the Delhi winters, what with a longish run followed by various workouts back in the battalion football field.

When the parade got over, all of us would run back to our barracks to quickly change in order to be ready in time for office. However, I suddenly heard the senior NCO calling me out after the parade was over.

I went back to him and was politely told, ‘Sir, we don’t wear this kind of shoes to PT Parade.’

That was all I needed to know even as that NCO with 22 years’ service behind him dismissed the 22 year old me, with all of two days of service in the battalion, with a gentle smile.

Needless to say, after lunch, one rifleman came over to me with a new pair of shoes for PT parade, alongwith a bill for the same, to be paid to the battalion’s canteen!

This was the first step in a continuous process of mentorship which actually continued even during my days as the battalion commander, but that is a story for another book!

What I intend to write here is another part of those early days of mine in the battalion – being the captain of the Battalion Football Team.

You see, Gorkhas are typically amongst the best footballers that there are. Not many can even think of beating a team of a Gorkha Battalion when it comes to inter-battalion football tournaments in the Indian Army.

In fact, they are so good that they will typically make a team with 10 players and whichever slot they are unable to fill in, will automatically go to the officer who is to be mandatorily a part of the team in the competition.

For most part, the officers in such teams find themselves outclassed by their fellow teammates, who are more than capable of carrying the match on their own. Now, this shouldn’t be seen as a commentary on the officer-men relationship in any way. This is just the way things are as far as many sports competitions go where the entire team is merit based, whereas the mandatory participation by an officer depends upon who is available in the battalion at that point in time and what caliber of a player he is.

So it was under such circumstances that I found myself as the captain of the battalion football team in the summer of 2004. The position allotted to me was that of the Centre-Forward.

Now, I know it is a key position, but before you go gaga, let me once again re-emphasize that it was the only position left unmanned after the rest of the players had been allotted their positions by the coach!

At the same time, the 24 year + 8 months old me was one of the oldest members of the team whose average age, less me, was less than 22 years!

However, one thing going for me was that for the past two and half years in the battalion, I had played football with the boys for atleast two hours a day and dare I say, from being just an average footballer during my training days, I had improved a lot, thanks to the relentless sessions with my boys.

Of course, I had also trained with the battalion team for nearly two months ahead of the competition, and they knew my strengths and weaknesses, as did I in their case.

It was a happy team, and dare I say, a supremely talented and confident one as well.

And they knew it.

As did every other potential competitor!

Soon the big day arrived and the Divisional Inter-Battalion Football Championship 2004 commenced in the small hill town where we were located. A total of 17 teams were participating.

The pace was relentless, with not even a single day’s break since the competition had to be completed within six days, from a Monday to the next Saturday. This meant a match every day for every team!

Matches continued apace.

In this duration, I was also responsible for training the battalion team for the mine-laying competition that too was carrying on concurrently. This involved practicing and demonstrating an elaborate set of drills while laying a minefield - a procedure that took a minimum of four hours from start to finish. But I will come to that in a while.

Cruising along, we were soon in the semi-finals, pitched against a local team of a Garhwal Rifles battalion who gave us a good run for our money that Friday evening!

Oh, by the way, the Centre-Forward of my battalion team had scored three goals in the tournament by then. And yes, that was me!

I was having a good run over the past few days – playing my match whether it was scheduled in the morning or the evening session, and spending rest of the day training with the mine laying team!

Anyhow, as they say, all good things must finally come to an end. So did this glory run of mine on the day of the semi-finals.

The opponent team was a good and strong one indeed. What added to the sense of competition was the fact that they and us were part of the same brigade, entrusted to go to war together. But here, this meant that we were in a bitter battle amongst ourselves.

Mind you, I use the word ‘bitter’ in the above statement with due consideration. It was a matter of honour for both the teams – us because, well, we were the most hyped up team, and they, because not only were they organizing the tournament, but this particular match was to be played on their home ground!

Needless to say, both the battalions turned out in nearly full strength to cheer their respective teams. This included ladies and children of the soldiers as well. Of course, occupying the best seats in the ground were the Brigade Commander himself along with his wife, flanked by both his Commanding Officers and their wives as well.

As I said, it was perhaps the toughest match of the tournament that we played. The Garhwalis were a bunch of good footballers individually, as well as a team. But then, so were we.

Just short of the half-time mark I sensed an opportunity as someone lobbed a ball towards the goal. To be fair, it was the goalkeeper’s ball, yet I in my exuberance decided to attempt to head it into the goal.

Of course the inevitable happened.

My 52 kilo frame collided mid-air with the goalkeeper’s 66 kilo frame!

The result was as expected. One moment I was up in the air, dreaming of yet another goal and the next moment I was lying flat on the ground, unable to breathe!

Pretty soon people realized that I was badly off. The match was stopped and medics rushed to the ground. I am told that I lay immobile for more than five minutes. I was conscious throughout, but was struggling to breathe, or even move.

Thankfully, I gradually regained control of my faculties and slowly got up, to a huge sigh of relief all around. After moving around tentatively for a while, trying to ascertain my state of health, I declared that I would carry on with the game, without substitution. That the half-time was hardly five minutes away also played a part in this decision.

In the midst of it all, my immediate senior in the battalion, or my senior subaltern, who was my earmarked substitute, had puffed away on three cigarettes, in the worry that he might finally be called upon to enter the field to try and kick a ball!

Anyhow, the match commenced and soon half-time was called. I spent the entire half-time lying on a bench, trying to recover from the fall that had nearly broken my neck.

Somewhat rejuvenated, I entered the second half with renewed gusto.

However, that too was soon kicked out of my system!

At some point in that half, I was running after an opponent who had the ball, trying to take it away from him. Somehow, in the process, his elbow connected with my jaw.

Whether it was intentional or unintentional is immaterial now after all these years.

What followed after that moment, however, is going to be etched in my memory forever!

It all happened in slow motion. I was insanely mad the moment he hit me. I knew I was falling down. In that moment all I wanted to do was to make him fall down too.

So I tried to grab hold of him on my way to meet the ground.

Unfortunately, I only managed to grab his shorts. Resultantly, he himself didn’t fall down, but was definitely immobilized, trying to pull up his shorts and cover his modesty, but for one little problem – I had a death grip on that particular garment at that moment!

He knew I was mad.

I think everyone in the ground and those watching the match knew it as well.

I also think my senior subaltern had lit up yet another cigarette by then!

Anyhow, oblivious to all of this, the moment I finished falling, I shouted some of the choicest profanities at him at the top of my voice.

And right at about that very moment, I slowly became aware of my surroundings.

I was lying on the ground at about the half-line of the field, less than six metres from the dais seating the Brigade Commander, both Commanding Officers and their wives.

And I was still holding the opponent’s shorts!

That poor fellow! All that he could do was look pleadingly at me!

Anyhow, realizing that I had landed myself in a pickle, I knew I needed a way out of this mess as well. So I did the next best thing that came to my mind – I let go of that guy’s shorts, got up and ran away from the scene as if nothing had happened!

All of this had happened in a span of less than 10 seconds, during which I, perhaps the most docile youngster of the battalion, had nearly stripped a guy half-naked and had also let lose a volley of profanities well within the earshot of some very senior officers and their wives. Not just that, but I had also ended up establishing momentary eye-contact with them all during all this!

And the match continued.

The opponents were a tough bunch, almost as good as us!

Anyhow, the second half as well as the extra time ended with neither team able to score a goal. So it all came down to the penalty shoot-out.

What happened next would put any sports thriller movie to shame.

We missed both the goals in the first two attempts while the Garhwalis scored on both occasions.

A deathly silence descended over our side of the audience, even as the home crowds of the opponents went wild with ecstasy.

But there were three more attempts left.

There was still hope, however dim.

However, I couldn’t bear to see it. I turned away from the scene of action, knowing that we were on the verge of losing the match after all those months of toil and the past few days of not conceding a single goal while scoring in excess of 30, even if more than half of them came against a single team.

So I decided to try and shut myself out of the humiliation that was sure to come, turning my back to the scene of the action and closing my eyes.

Only that it didn’t turn out that way.

God bless Rakesh, our goalkeeper, who saved ALL THREE attempts on his goalpost while the rest of our shooters scored all three!

The entire field soon erupted with wild shrieks of joy as practically the entire battalion of mine rushed onto the field to lift the team on their shoulders. It took quite some time and efforts for order to be restored so that the customary End of Match ceremonies could be conducted.

Match in bag, the Gorkhas and their families marched off to their lines in one big and slow victory procession, with the Commanding Officer himself dancing away in bliss, alongwith them.

Of course, the broken and battered me quietly drove back home to my wife of five months who was shocked out of her wits when she saw me. It took quite some time and effort to stop her from crying!

Thankfully, seeing my state, the Battalion 2iC had excused me from an Officers’ Mess function to which we all were invited later that evening. I was really badly off from both the injuries. In fact, such was the injury to my jaw that for the next four days I couldn’t eat any solid food, and had to rely on fluids instead!

A good night’s rest later, I woke up fresh and ready to take on the world the next day, which happened to be a Saturday. The first order of the day was to get ready and move out with the Battalion Mine Laying Team to the site of the competition, some 75 minutes’ drive away!

Anyhow, we did our bit in the mine laying competition and rushed back because we all were keen to be there in time for the final match of the football championship later that evening; my fellow mine-laying buddies because they wanted to see and cheer their team and I, because .. well .. I was the damned captain of the team and could not be found missing from the finals!

The final match was with a fellow Gorkha battalion of a neighbouring brigade who surprised us by scoring the first goal. Mind you, it was the first field goal scored against our team in that tournament. Yet they weren’t half as tough a competition as the Garhwalis whom we had met and defeated in the semis barely 24 hours ago. Needless to say, we soon scored two goals and took a lead by the second half.

As the match drew to a close, the opponent team tried desperately to equalize. After a point in time, they pushed practically each and every player of theirs into our half, hoping to swamp us and score. But they still couldn’t succeed.

At this point in time, a foul-ball somewhere near the half-line led to us getting possession and a free kick. I don’t know what came over me, but just as the ball was passed to the Right-Out of my team, I made a mad dash for the goalpost.

Sarad, the Right-Out soon reached the corner of the field and I shouted out to him for a pass. He obliged by lobbing the ball towards the goalpost and I managed to head it, thereby scoring what was to be the final goal of the tournament!

The moment I realized I had scored, I was beside myself with joy.

The very next moment came a pat on my back. I turned to see who it was.

It was the oldest member of the team, a recently promoted NCO named Norgen. Yes, he came up to me to give me a pat on my back. And he said, ‘Hard work ALWAYS gets you good reward.’

Mind you, the English translation doesn’t even come close to what he actually said in Nepalese that evening, and the way he said it.

But here it was - an NCO giving a pat on the back to a young officer. An officer, who was in a way, not so young anymore, having spent more than 30 months in the battalion and already mentoring two younger officers himself. Yet my own mentorship too continued apace.

Norgen had only done what came quite naturally to him. He had seen me toil and sweat and bleed with the team for the past many months. He had seen me work harder than most of my teammates because whereas they had sheer talent and were the best of the best available in the battalion, I had to rely on pure hard work just to play catch-up with them.

Through this all, the team had carried me along, ending with a high when I scored that final goal. I have no shame in admitting that this remains the very best football team I have seen the battalion field, even 18 years later, including the three during which I commanded the battalion and tried to replicate it.

Norgen went on to play for the Army Team soon thereafter, as did two more boys from the team.

Oh, my wife was also there in the audience that evening when I scored that goal. Too bad that she was busy chatting with someone and missed seeing me score that goal!

Before I forget, a quick word about the mine-laying competition as well!

Many weeks later, the Battalion Subedar Major, the seniormost JCO and the grand old man of the battalion, told me what went through his mind when he saw me fall in the semi-final. Expecting a word or two of concern about one of the battalion officers, I looked at him in anticipation.

‘The moment you fell, I thought who would take the mine-laying team for the competition tomorrow’, he said!

It took me a moment to digest what I had just heard. I am sure the Subedar Major would have seen a flood of emotions crossing my face, before I realized that he did have a point!

We stood second in the entire Division in that competition as well!

That was one hell of a tenure. We worked hard .. insanely hard, in fact.

And we played hard!
 

Manmohan wrote:

Link

Sharing some excerpts with the permission of the author

It so happened that a young, newly married Captain Subhajit had just reported back to his unit in Kota, Rajasthan with his young bride still new to the ways of the army. Less than a week later, a very senior officer was to visit the location and he was made responsible for the lunch that would be hosted for the VIP guest.

On the day of the lunch, his wife, being the newest lady in the station, found herself seated right next to the guest couple. In the course of casual chit-chat over the meal, the guest asked her how well was she adjusting to army life.

Pat came the reply from the young lady - 'I don’t like it very much.’

Capt Subhajhit, who is now a Colonel, tells that since he was not eating at that moment, thanks to his responsibility to ensure all arrangements went smoothly, he didn’t quite know what happened, but he saw the entire room suddenly go quiet!

He didn’t know it then, but his wife was not very happy at her husband being away in office for long periods of time, and she told the guest in as many words!

What she probably didn’t know was that Capt Subhajit was in a spin over the past few days because a visit by such a senior officer required a lot of preparations in advance. But then, it wouldn’t be fair to blame a young lady whose entire exposure to army life was hardly a week long!

Anyhow, back to the silence.

It lingered on for a few, excruciatingly long seconds before the guest sought out Capt Subhajit’s commanding officer and asked him to see to it that the situation is rectified at the earliest.

And true to the traditions of military efficiency, Capt Subhajit and his wife were ORDERED to proceed for a four day long sojourn to the nearby Ranthambhore National Park that very day!

As they say, all is well that ends well. This is exactly what happened in this case as well, along with a story that has been told and retold over and over again!

The history of China is a history of warfare. Wars have caused dynasties to collapse, fractured the thin façade of national unity, and brought decades of alien occupation. But throughout Chinese history, its warfare has been guided by principles different from those that governed Europe. Chinese strategists followed the concept, first articulated by Sun-tzu in The Art of War, ofqi (ch'i), or unorthodox, warfare. The concept of ofqi involves creating tactical imbalances in order to achieve victory against even vastly superior forces. Ralph D. Sawyer, translator of The Art of War and one of America's preeminent experts on Chinese military tactics, here offers a comprehensive guide to the ancient practice of unorthodox warfare. He describes, among many other tactics, how Chinese generals have used false rumors to exploit opposing generals' distrust of their subordinates; dressed thousands of women as soldiers to create the illusion of an elite attack force; and sent word of a false surrender to lure enemy troops away from a vital escape route. The Tao of Deception is the book that military tacticians and military historians will turn to as the definitive guide to a new, yet ancient, way of thinking about strategy.

Many policymakers, journalists, and scholars insist that U.S. hegemony is essential for warding off global chaos. Good-Bye Hegemony! argues that hegemony is a fiction propagated to support a large defense establishment, justify American claims to world leadership, and buttress the self-esteem of voters. It is also contrary to American interests and the global order. Simon Reich and Richard Ned Lebow argue that hegemony should instead find expression in agenda setting, economic custodianship, and the sponsorship of global initiatives. Today, these functions are diffused through the system, with European countries, China, and lesser powers making important contributions. In contrast, the United States has often been a source of political and economic instability.

Rejecting the focus on power common to American realists and liberals, the authors offer a novel analysis of influence. In the process, they differentiate influence from power and power from material resources. Their analysis shows why the United States, the greatest power the world has ever seen, is increasingly incapable of translating its power into influence. Reich and Lebow use their analysis to formulate a more realistic place for America in world affairs.

This book develops a new approach in explaining how a nation's Grand Strategy is constituted, how to assess its merits, and how grand strategies may be comparatively evaluated within a broader framework. The volume responds to three key problems common to both academia and policymaking. First, the literature on the concept of grand strategy generally focuses on the United States, offering no framework for comparative analysis. Indeed, many proponents of US grand strategy suggest that the concept can only be applied, at most, to a very few great powers such as China and Russia. Second, characteristically it remains prescriptive rather than explanatory, ignoring the central conundrum of why differing countries respond in contrasting ways to similar pressures. Third, it often understates the significance of domestic politics and policymaking in the formulation of grand strategies - emphasizing mainly systemic pressures. This book addresses these problems. It seeks to analyze and explain grand strategies through the intersection of domestic and international politics in ten countries grouped distinctively as great powers (The G5), regional powers (Brazil and India) and pivotal powers hostile to each other who are able to destabilize the global system (Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia). The book thus employs a comparative framework that describes and explains why and how domestic actors and mechanisms, coupled with external pressures, create specific national strategies. Overall, the book aims to fashion a valid, cross-contextual framework for an emerging research program on grand strategic analysis.

Crowds and Power is a revolutionary work in which Elias Canetti finds a new way of looking at human history and psychology. Breathtaking in its range and erudition, it explores Shiite festivals and the English Civil war, the finger exercises of monkeys and the effects of inflation in Weimar Germany. In this study of the interplay of crowds, Canetti offers one of the most profound and startling portraits of the human condition.

A long-awaited English translation of the groundbreaking oral history of women in World War II across Europe and Russia—from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

“A landmark.”—Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

For more than three decades, Svetlana Alexievich has been the memory and conscience of the twentieth century. When the Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize, it cited her invention of “a new kind of literary genre,” describing her work as “a history of emotions . . . a history of the soul.”

In The Unwomanly Face of War, Alexievich chronicles the experiences of the Soviet women who fought on the front lines, on the home front, and in the occupied territories. These women—more than a million in total—were nurses and doctors, pilots, tank drivers, machine-gunners, and snipers. They battled alongside men, and yet, after the victory, their efforts and sacrifices were forgotten.

Alexievich traveled thousands of miles and visited more than a hundred towns to record these women’s stories. Together, this symphony of voices reveals a different aspect of the war—the everyday details of life in combat left out of the official histories.

Translated by the renowned Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Unwomanly Face of War is a powerful and poignant account of the central conflict of the twentieth century, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human side of war.

“But why? I asked myself more than once. Why, having stood up for and held their own place in a once absolutely male world, have women not stood up for their history? Their words and feelings? They did not believe themselves. A whole world is hidden from us. Their war remains unknown . . . I want to write the history of that war. A women’s history.”—Svetlana Alexievich

In recent decades, scholars have argued that the Roman Republic's political culture was essentially democratic in nature, stressing the central role of the 'sovereign' people and their assemblies. Karl-J. Hölkeskamp challenges this view in Reconstructing the Roman Republic, warning that this scholarly trend threatens to become the new orthodoxy, and defending the position that the republic was in fact a uniquely Roman, dominantly oligarchic and aristocratic political form.

Hölkeskamp offers a comprehensive, in-depth survey of the modern debate surrounding the Roman Republic. He looks at the ongoing controversy first triggered in the 1980s when the 'oligarchic orthodoxy' was called into question by the idea that the republic's political culture was a form of Greek-style democracy, and he considers the important theoretical and methodological advances of the 1960s and 1970s that prepared the ground for this debate. Hölkeskamp renews and refines the 'elitist' view, showing how the republic was a unique kind of premodern city-state political culture shaped by a specific variant of a political class. He covers a host of fascinating topics, including the Roman value system; the senatorial aristocracy; competition in war and politics within this aristocracy; and the symbolic language of public rituals and ceremonies, monuments, architecture, and urban topography.


Certain to inspire continued debate, Reconstructing the Roman Republic offers fresh approaches to the study of the republic while attesting to the field's enduring vitality.

Ukraine is currently embroiled in a tense battle with Russia to preserve its economic and political independence. But today’s conflict is only the latest in a long history of battles over Ukraine’s existence as a sovereign nation. As award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy argues in The Gates of Europe, we must examine Ukraine’s past in order to understand its fraught present and likely future.

Situated between Europe, Russia, and the Asian East, Ukraine was shaped by the empires that have used it as a strategic gateway between East and West—from the Romans and Ottomans to the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, all have engaged in global fights for supremacy on Ukrainian soil. Each invading army left a lasting mark on the landscape and on the population, making modern Ukraine an amalgam of competing cultures.

Authoritative and vividly written, The Gates of Europe will be the definitive history of Ukraine for years to come.

Leading scholars and policymakers explore how history influences foreign policy and offer insights on how the study of the past can more usefully serve the present.
History, with its insights, analogies, and narratives, is central to the ways that the United States interacts with the world. Historians and policymakers, however, rarely engage one another as effectively or fruitfully as they might. This book bridges that divide, bringing together leading scholars and policymakers to address the essential questions surrounding the history-policy relationship including Mark Lawrence on the numerous, and often contradictory, historical lessons that American observers have drawn from the Vietnam War; H. W. Brands on the role of analogies in U.S. policy during the Persian Gulf crisis and war of 1990–91; and Jeremi Suri on Henry Kissinger's powerful use of history.

The term “civilization” comes with considerable baggage, dichotomizing people, cultures, and histories as “civilized”—or not. While the idea of civilization has been deployed throughout history to justify all manner of interventions and sociopolitical engineering, few scholars have stopped to consider what the concept actually means. Here, Brett Bowden examines how the idea of civilization has informed our thinking about international relations over the course of ten centuries.

From the Crusades to the colonial era to the global war on terror, this sweeping volume exposes “civilization” as a stage-managed account of history that legitimizes imperialism, uniformity, and conformity to Western standards, culminating in a liberal-democratic global order. Along the way, Bowden explores the variety of confrontations and conquests—as well as those peoples and places excluded or swept aside—undertaken in the name of civilization. Concluding that the “West and the rest” have more commonalities than differences, this provocative and engaging book ultimately points the way toward an authentic inter-civilizational dialogue that emphasizes cooperation over clashes.

A satisfactory comprehensive history of the social and economic development of pre-modern China, the largest country in the world in terms of population, and with a documentary record covering three millennia, is still far from possible. The present work is only an attempt to disengage the major themes that seem to be of relevance to our understanding of China today. In particular, this volume studies three questions. Why did the Chinese Empire stay together when the Roman Empire, and every other empire of the antiquity of the middle ages, ultimately collapsed? What were the causes of the medieval revolution which made the Chinese economy after about 1100 the most advanced in the world? And why did China after about 1350 fail to maintain her earlier pace of technological advance while still, in many respects, advancing economically? The three sections of the book deal with these problems in turn but the division of a subject matter is to some extent only one of convenience. These topics are so interrelated that, in the last analysis, none of them can be considered in isolation from the others.

In this engaging narrative, brought to life by marine artist Ian Marshall’s beautiful full‑color paintings, historian Paul Kennedy grapples with the rise and fall of the Great Powers during World War II. Tracking the movements of the six major navies of the Second World War—the allied navies of Britain, France, and the United States and the Axis navies of Germany, Italy, and Japan—Kennedy tells a story of naval battles, maritime campaigns, convoys, amphibious landings, and strikes from the sea. From the elimination of the Italian, German, and Japanese fleets and almost all of the French fleet, to the end of the era of the big‑gunned surface vessel, the advent of the atomic bomb, and the rise of an American economic and military power larger than anything the world had ever seen, Kennedy shows how the strategic landscape for naval affairs was completely altered between 1936 and 1946.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Paul Kennedy, the award-winning author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and one of today’s most renowned historians, now provides a new and unique look at how World War II was won. Engineers of Victory is a fascinating nuts-and-bolts account of the strategic factors that led to Allied victory. Kennedy reveals how the leaders’ grand strategy was carried out by the ordinary soldiers, scientists, engineers, and businessmen responsible for realizing their commanders’ visions of success. In January 1943, FDR and Churchill convened in Casablanca and established the Allied objectives for the war: to defeat the Nazi blitzkrieg; to control the Atlantic sea lanes and the air over western and central Europe; to take the fight to the European mainland, and to end Japan’s imperialism. Astonishingly, a little over a year later, these ambitious goals had nearly all been accomplished. With riveting, tactical detail, Engineers of Victory reveals how. Kennedy recounts the inside stories of the invention of the cavity magnetron, a miniature radar “as small as a soup plate,” and the Hedgehog, a multi-headed grenade launcher that allowed the Allies to overcome the threat to their convoys crossing the Atlantic; the critical decision by engineers to install a super-charged Rolls-Royce engine in the P-51 Mustang, creating a fighter plane more powerful than the Luftwaffe’s; and the innovative use of pontoon bridges (made from rafts strung together) to help Russian troops cross rivers and elude the Nazi blitzkrieg. He takes readers behind the scenes, unveiling exactly how thousands of individual Allied planes and fighting ships were choreographed to collectively pull off the invasion of Normandy, and illuminating how crew chiefs perfected the high-flying and inaccessible B-29 Superfortress that would drop the atomic bombs on Japan. The story of World War II is often told as a grand narrative as if it were fought by supermen or decided by fate. Here Kennedy uncovers the real heroes of the war, highlighting for the first time the creative strategies, tactics, and organizational decisions that made the lofty Allied objectives into a successful reality. In an even more significant way, Engineers of Victory has another claim to our attention, for it restores “the middle level of war” to its rightful place in history.

Praise for Engineers of Victory “Engineers of Victory achieves the difficult task of being a consistently original book about one of the most relentlessly examined episodes in human history. . . . Like an engineer who pries open a pocket watch to reveal its inner mechanics, Kennedy tells how little-known men and woman at lower levels helped win the war. . . . An important contribution to our understanding of World War II.”—Michael Beschloss, The New York Times Book Review “In this valuable addition to the very long shelf of recent books about World War II, Kennedy looks at the 18 months before the D-Day invasion in June 1944. . . . As he walks the reader through the critical breakthroughs required to achieve such daunting tasks as attacking an enemy shore thousands of miles from home, Kennedy colorfully and convincingly illustrates the ingenuity and persistence of a few men who made all the difference.”—The Washington Post

Paul Kennedy owes a great deal to the editor who persuaded him to add a final chapter to this study of the factors that contributed to the rise and fall of European powers since the age of Spain’s Philip II. This tailpiece indulged in what was, for a historian, a most unusual activity: it looked into the future. Pondering whether the United States would ultimately suffer the same decline as every imperium that preceded it, it was this chapter that made The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers a dinner party talking point in Washington government circles. In so doing, it elevated Kennedy to the ranks of public intellectuals whose opinions were canvassed on matters of state policy.

From a strictly academic point of view, the virtues of Kennedy's work lie elsewhere, specifically in his flair for asking the sort of productive questions that characterize a great problem-solver. Kennedy's work is an example of an increasingly rare genre – a work of comparative history that transcends the narrow confines of state– and era-specific studies to identify the common factors that underpin the successes and failures of highly disparate states.

Kennedy's prime contribution is the now-famous concept of ‘imperial overstretch,’ the idea that empires fall largely because the military commitments they acquire during the period of their rise ultimately become too much to sustain once they lose the economic competitive edge that had projected them to dominance in the first place. Earlier historians may have glimpsed this central truth, and even applied it in studies of specific polities, but it took a problem-solver of Kennedy's ability to extend the analysis convincingly across half a millennium.

Cyrano wrote:Interesting. The French were involved in similar activities too. Reunion and Caribbean islands changed hands a few times between the French and the British. I always wanted to explore the French vs British tussles during the colonial period and how the British won some and the French won the others... some day I'll find good books on it the time to read them.

1. Fascinating account of hubris on part of Britain and France
2. How countries with weak economies have no business projecting power
3. Without securing a political end objective, you fritter away gains on the battlefield
4. Reality is that if you are not strong enough to go it alone, you need to game big power/ power bloc moves
5. For all the bonhomie the special relationship between GB and the US had more than its share of irritants. Major ones. When we engage with other countries we need to keep that in mind. It's never smooth sailing.

1. The Vietnam debacle seen unfolding through French eyes. Hubris. Weak economy. Vacuum off leadership on French side.
2. Without a great powers support its difficult to win. Forget stories of grit. It was Chinese material that forged pathway for VietCong. Not taking away their grit and determination for nationalism.
3. American miscalculation. At one time Hi Chi Min was amenable to discard Communism if he would get American support for independence.
4. Brutality of war. After reading about Dien Ben Phu one can't but feel sorry for the front liners on each side.
5. Logistics, Logistics, Logistics. The French lost the battle because they gave up the initiative and logistics was bad.
6. Again reinforcing the fact that one can't win a battle from the air.
7. Failure compounded because of sloth and miscommunication in command structure.
8. Again political will. The French suffered fewer losses at Dien Ben Phu. They could have recovered from the battle but lack of national will brought the ignominious defeat. Lessons for us in India faced by BIF termites who keep gnawing away at our national spirit.
9. How France and Britain despite bring close allies played their cards at cross purposes to the US. Yet they stayed allies.
10. Beautiful description of how Molotov and the CCCP mentored Chou En Lai and brought Communist China to its first great power conference.
11. Also let's forget all talks of India could have been a Permanent Member. Post the Geneva Conference in May 1954, China had arrived at the high table.
12. And finally, no friends in geopolitics. Only permanent thing is national interest. The book which draws extensively on US, UK, FR and to a lesser extent on CCCP archives details personal interactions. Seeing this no one would have thought that CCCP would fight with China in another 15 years and three US would be embracing China's in two years more.

One in every twenty difficult conflicts ends up grinding to a halt. That's fully 5 percent of not just the diplomatic and political clashes we read about in the newspaper, but disputations and arguments from our everyday lives as well. Once we get pulled into these self-perpetuating conflicts it is nearly impossible to escape. The 5 percent rule us.
So what can we do when we find ourselves ensnared? According to Dr. Peter T. Coleman, the solution is in seeing our conflict anew. Applying lessons from complexity theory to examples from both American domestic politics and international diplomacy--from abortion debates to the enmity between Israelis and Palestinians--Coleman provides innovative new strategies for dealing with intractable disputes. A timely, paradigm-shifting look at conflict, The Five Percent is an invaluable guide to preventing even the most fractious negotiations from foundering.

World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. The Second World War was not Hitler’s war; it was Stalin’s war.

Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin’s War revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler’s genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, did the Pacific war of 1941–1945 fulfill Stalin’s goal of unleashing a devastating war of attrition between Japan and the “Anglo-Saxon” capitalist powers he viewed as his ultimate adversary.

McMeekin also reveals the extent to which Soviet Communism was rescued by the US and Britain’s self-defeating strategic moves, beginning with Lend-Lease aid, as American and British supply boards agreed almost blindly to every Soviet demand. Stalin’s war machine, McMeekin shows, was substantially reliant on American materiél from warplanes, tanks, trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, fuel, ammunition, and explosives, to industrial inputs and technology transfer, to the foodstuffs which fed the Red Army.

This unreciprocated American generosity gave Stalin’s armies the mobile striking power to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism.

A groundbreaking reassessment of the Second World War, Stalin’s War is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the current world order.

Whatever their virtues, men are more violent than women. Why do men kill, rape, and wage war, and what can we do about it? Demonic Males offers startling new answers to these questions. Drawing on the latest discoveries about human evolution and about our closest living relatives, the great apes, the book unfolds a compelling argument that the secrets of a peaceful society may well be, first, a sharing of power between males and females, and second, a high level and variety of sexual activity, both homosexual and heterosexual. Dramatic, vivid, and sometimes shocking, but firmly grounded in meticulous scientific research, Demonic Males will stir controversy and debate. It will be required reading for anyone concerned about the spiral of violence undermining human society.

Drawing on the core values of western civilization, the author refines the counterparts in Chinese civilization, summarized as four core principles: duty before freedom, obedience before rights, community before individual, and harmony before conflict. Focusing on guoxue or Sinology as the basis of his approach, the author provides detailed explanations of traditional Chinese values. Recent scholars have addressed the concept of guoxue since the modern age, sorting through it and piecing it together, which has produced an extremely abundant range of information. However, given that the concepts and theories involved have been left largely unanalyzed, this book develops a theoretical treatment of them in several important respects. First, it analyzes the mindset of guoxue, examining the dominant ideas and values of the era from which the term “guoxue” arose, focusing on its connection to early changes and trends in society and culture, and distinguishing three key phases of development. Past scholars mainly had in mind the range of objects studied in guoxue when defining it, and what this book underscores is the meaning of guoxue as a modern body of research. Secondly, it assesses several phases in the modern evolution of the body of guoxue research from the beginning to the end of the 20th century, i.e., ending with the later phase of the National Heritage movement. Third and lastly, the book explores the various main modes of modern guoxue, which correspond step by step with the evolutionary phases of guoxue research.

This classic text by Fei Xiaotong, China's finest social scientist, was first published in 1947 and is Fei's chief theoretical statement about the distinctive characteristics of Chinese society. Written in Chinese from a Chinese point of view for a Chinese audience, From the Soil describes the contrasting organizational principles of Chinese and Western societies, thereby conveying the essential features of both. Fei shows how these unique features reflect and are reflected in the moral and ethical characters of people in these societies. This profound, challenging book is both succinct and accessible. In its first complete English-language edition, it is likely to have a wide impact on Western social theorists.

Gary G. Hamilton and Wang Zheng's translation captures Fei's jargonless, straightforward style of writing. Their introduction describes Fei's education and career as a sociologist, the fate of his writings on and off the Mainland, and the sociological significance of his analysis. The translators' epilogue highlights the social reforms for China that Fei drew from his analysis and advocated in a companion text written in the same period.